Tomas Bogardus Plays Chess With a Pigeon
The pigeon is PZ Myers
Never play chess with a pigeon.
The pigeon just knocks all the pieces over.
Then shits all over the board.
Then struts around like it won.
—Chinese proverb.
Recently on Twitter, Tomas Bogardus, a seemingly pretty good philosopher who is nonetheless somehow a catholic and (I think) natural law theorist, had a very funny spat with notorious twat PZ Myers. While Bogardus is a theist and Myers an atheist, I find myself far, far more in agreement with Bogardus in this exchange. I’m willing to make a stronger claim—any person with a half functioning brain will find the conclusion that Bogardus was in the right, at least in their particular exchange, irresistible.
Bogardus started with the following argument.
1. The sexes--male and female--have been around since before Saturn had rings.
2. Societies have not.
3. If something predates societies, then it cannot be a social construct.
4. So, the sexes--male and female--cannot be social constructs.
This is all correct. Sexes—the things—are not social constructs. Of course, the words are social constructs, and we could use them to refer to other things if they were more expedient. But the things picked up by the words are obviously not.
Myers replied
Right off the bat, this is deranged. Bogardus was not characterizing anyone’s view except his own. He was presenting a deductively valid argument for a conclusion. This is like saying that appealing to the law of non-contradiction in an argument is “mischaracterizing so blatantly,” because one’s dissenters don’t disagree with the law of non-contradiction. If Bogardus mischaracterized, it would be the most impressive act of mischaracterization ever—he somehow managed to mischaracterize without characterizing. Perhaps this makes sense in upside-down PZ Myers clown world, but it does not in reality.
They went a few rounds, each of which involved Myers expressing with increasing fervency that he denied the conclusion, without clearly explaining which premise he disagreed with, all the while butchering very basic philosophical concepts. Myers ended up, after getting utterly crushed on every point, throwing a tantrum.
And then, hilariously, he took to his blog to declare that he’d crushed that idiot Bogardus. He disputed premise 2, saying
2. Now we are already getting on shaky ground. Define “societies”. Primates have cultures, patterns of behavior that are passed on by education and learning from generation to generation. We are plagued by the fuzziness of that “before Saturn had rings” nonsense, but to get around the difficulty of dealing with his even more poorly defined term of “societies”, I’ll agree, even though it might be that primate societies might be older than Saturn’s rings, we’ll have to wait for the astronomers to figure out. At least I can definitely agree that societies, broadly defined, are definitely younger than sexual reproduction and meiosis.
Okay, maybe there’s some dispute about when Saturn had rings. Though it seems like most views hold that they were around before societies. But the argument can just be rephrased as “conditional on most standard views, according to which the rings of Saturn are around 100 million years old, societies have not.” Then the conclusion would follow that sex is a social contract conditional on most standard views according to which the rings of Saturn are around 100 million years old. But presumably if this is true, then Bogardus’ conclusion would also be true—the correct view about gender cannot depend on the actual age of Saturn’s rings.
Next, Myers objects to three which claims that things that came before societies cannot be societally constructed.
3. Kaboom, there’s the stupid leap of illogic. Sex evolves, it changes rapidly, and social definitions of sexual behavior change frenetically. We humans do not possess a single genetic locus that cleanly defines sex — we have piled on all these complexities and elaborations that are still essential parts of sex, and many of them are entirely cultural. We are more than MATa or MATα. The idea that men should have short hair and wear pants, while women should have long hair and wear dresses, is entirely a social construct. You cannot simply declare that because yeast have a specific sexual identity that can be localized to a single gene, that therefore everything about human males and human females must therefore be fixed and unaffected by fleeting social mores.
Sure, you can get me to agree in general with points 1 and 2, but with point 3 you’re suddenly endorsing the idea that Victorian ideas about sex and sex roles, for example, cannot possibly be social constructs because ancient eukaryotes could carry out meiosis. You think you’ve crafted an inescapable syllogism and have caught me, but really, you’re the one trapped.
But all this demonstrates is that the term sex is a social construct. But of course it is! Bogardus agreed with that! All terms are social constructs—they are not written by god—we make them up. But the things the term picks out are not social constructs. The term planet is a social construct—we made it up. But planets are not a social construct—we did not generate construct.
The argument for 3 would be
Something is only socially constructed if it was created by society
Society cannot create things before it exists
Therefore, things that are socially constructed cannot have been created before society existed.
It’s also funny how Myers cartoonishly and bufoonishly calls Bogardus’ statement a ridiculous leap of illogic, when it is almost trivially true, and was not justified, in Bogardus’ argument, based on other premises—it was just a premise that he would have defended if challenged. Not only is there not illogic there—it isn’t even a leap.
To reply to his asinine point about Victorian ideas about sex roles—of course sex roles in human societies are often social constructs. But this doesn’t mean that sex itself is. Just as the way we respond to planets is socially constructed—we choose it—but planets are not, so too are sex roles constructed but sex not.
But then, that’s the way TERFs work: stupidity and lies are all they’ve got.
This was funny. Apparently, Bogardus is a radical feminist (!?), much to his surprise no doubt.
Okay, so now that I’ve written this article, I feel a bit of an obligation to explain why I wrote it, because it’s just covering a very trivial twitter spat. Well, for one, it was fun to write, and the thing I talk about was funny. I also think that it is the quintessential example of pigeon chess described by the quote—Myers, after butchering philosophy, language, and basic logic—goes back to his blog, declaring that he won, in the clearest example of shitting over the board them strutting around as if he won.
This is pretty hilarious
😂